VARIATIONS IN MEANING OF TERMS. 239 



same body of individuals, the inhabitants of the towns having 

 been earliest converted ; as in our own day, and at all times, 

 the greater activity of social intercourse renders them the 

 earliest recipients of new opinions and modes, while old habits 

 and prejudices linger longest among the country people: not 

 to mention that the towns were more immediately under the 

 direct influence of the government, which at that time had 

 embraced Christianity. From this casual coincidence, the 

 word paganus carried with it, and began more and more 

 steadily to suggest, the idea of a worshipper of the ancient 

 divinities ; until at length it suggested that idea so forcibly 

 that people who did not desire to suggest the idea avoided 

 using the word. But when paganus had come to connote 

 heathenism, the very unimportant circumstance, with reference 

 to that fact, of the place of residence, was soon disregarded in 

 the employment of the word. As there was seldom any occa 

 sion for making separate assertions respecting heathens who 

 lived in the country, there was no need for a separate word to 

 denote them ; and pagan came not only to mean heathen, but 

 to mean that exclusively. 



A case still more familiar to most readers is that of the 

 word villain or villein. This term, as everybody knows, had 

 in the middle ages a connotation as strictly defined as a word 

 could have, being the proper legal designation for those per 

 sons who were the subjects of the less onerous forms of feudal 

 bondage. The scorn of the semibarbarous military aristocracy 

 for these their abject dependants, rendered the act of likening 

 any person to this class of people a mark of the greatest con 

 tumely : the same scorn led them to ascribe to the same people 

 all manner of hateful qualities, which doubtless also, in the 

 degrading situation in which they were held, were often not 

 unjustly imputed to them. These circumstances combined to 

 attach to the term villain, ideas of crime and guilt in so forcible 

 a manner, that the application of the epithet even to those to 

 whom it legally belonged became an affront, and was abstained 

 from whenever no affront was intended. From that time 

 guilt was part of the connotation ; and soon became the whole 



